RSS
Facebook
Twitter
E-PrinceReader Comments
Robots and roommates: when it’s hard to tell the difference
Published: Friday, October 10th, 2008
A partial transcript of my roommate Alexis’ late-night session with psychotherapist ELIZA:
ELIZA: Hello, I am Eliza.
ALEXIS: Hello, I am Alexis.
ELIZA: Do you believe it is normal to be Alexis?
ALEXIS: Yes.
ELIZA: I see.
ALEXIS: You’re ...
(back to the article)
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual commenters and do not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. We do not take responsibility for the opinions, facts, or claims presented by individual commenters, and reserve the right to moderate or delete inappropriate comments.
Josephine, I love your science articles. Not nearly enough people write or comment on them, here at the Prince or in mainstream journalism in general. Keep it up!
I'm a bit suspicious of your pasted conversation with ALICE.
Indeed, when you ask Alice, "How was your day?" (I know this to be the human) you get the exact "I was really busy chatting with people on the web." If you then respond to that with "Me too, now I'm tired." you get back "I'm glad we agree, unknown person. Why now? Better get some rest." So, it seems like you are reporting a real conversation (she does indeed say "Better get some rest.") while cutting out valuable details that would cause it to flunk the Turing Test- as ALICE clearly does, with the inclusion of 'unknown person'. I don't know if this was deliberate misleading (note the lack of ellipsis) or if by chance, I am actually wrong and the first speaker (how was your day) is ALICE.
Hi thanks for the nice article. I had a chat with ALICE after reading your article, and it was cool to find that ALICE also said "I was really busy chatting with people on the web," the exact sentence.